by Rick Bass
Later in the evening they began preparing the multitude of leftovers into various side-recipes, freezing some and parceling the others into Pyrex dishes to keep for the coming week, and then they sat around in the living room and visited further about all the things for which they were thankful.
Ruth, and the school, of course; and this year, Richard. They were thankful for the children, for a country at peace—there was another war going on—and for their health, the latter acknowledged for their own sake, but also for that of their elder statesman.
Food, water, shelter; freedom of speech, freedom of assembly—all of the time-tested rights, seemingly as durable as to be almost geologic in nature; though still, they were acknowledged.
Annie was even quieter than usual, and Ruth hoped that it was because she was missing her playmates, the sole child that day in a house full of adults—though later when Annie commented how she was grateful for Marie, Ruth knew the real reason for her quietness, and felt the bottom of her heart go out in a way she was usually able to guard against.
They went for a walk that evening after dark. They walked down the gravel road to the east, on past the window-lit squares of occasional other homes, and past the dark schoolhouse silhouetted by starlight. Farther on, the road went from gravel to sand, and still they followed it, Herbert Mix wanting to stop and rest or turn back, but unwilling to abandon or be abandoned by them, and certainly unwilling to see Marie draw away from him: and finally when they reached the top of a small rise, from which they could see the purple velvet of the desert below, with a lopsided three-quarters moon rising above the horizon, they sat in the cool sand and watched the swollen moon struggle to ascend as if from beneath them.
There was a cooling breeze sliding across the sand from the north, and they listened to the cries and yaps of the coyotes, and looked out at the little lights of Odessa, and the nearer, scattered lights of the houses around Mormon Springs, and at all the gas flares, some far-flung and others closer, the flares appearing festive, reassuring—and Herbert Mix, though weakened by the walk, sat tucked in close against Marie, and she against him; and Ruth likewise edged in close against Richard and, after a while, reached for and found his hand, and took it with both of hers, and held it for a long time, until Marie finally announced that she was getting cold.
Like travelers or even penitents nearing some long-sought destination, they walked together back down the rise in silence, back toward their tiny community, which was darker now: and the walk was peaceful, and yet they each glimpsed for a moment, here and there, like shutterings of images, the size of the country beyond them, dark and complete. And Annie and Richard were aware also as they walked of all the pods and lenses of water beneath them, stacked sometimes like schools of fish amidst the darkness of all-else stone: some of the water already gone away, and some of it poisoned.
But threads and ribbons of it, still sweet and usable, still miraculous, in other places; and just beneath their feet, as they walked.
The going-away of the water was most stressful upon Marie. In the twenty years since she had been gone from the salt lake, she had gotten used to not hauling her water, to not being held hostage by its paucity, and she did not intend to ever go back to that sort of life. Worse for her, however, than even the threat of the water going away for good, or being poisoned, was the occasional sandy rasp and hiss of the faucets, which each time reminded her of her days and dreams out at the lake: of the terror she had felt as those sheets of sand had come sliding in over the tin roof of their shack.
And in that memory, she was humbled by the recollection of her weakness, her breaking-down. She knew that she could break again—that no one was unbreakable—and so she beheld Richard and the strangeness of his arrival with gratitude, and wondered occasionally at the source of the impulse that had drawn him back, and from so great a distance.
In the first week of December, a gift came for Marie, though at the time, no one had understood that it would be for her, for in its conception, it had been planned for the children.
In his brief visit, and his short run at the queen, the Mormon businessman Joe had mentioned to Ruth that during his missionary time in Asia he had met a group of women who were refugees from Vietnam. They had been injured by land mines set along the Cambodian border—some maimed by mines in the most recent war, others by mines set by the British during the imperialist campaigns of previous decades—and though each of the women were missing at least one limb, with some of them missing two or three, they nonetheless were able to weave, on looms specially designed for them by a Quaker relief organization, the most incredible silk scarves and kimonos, which were quickly in demand.
For a while, Joe—in addition to pursuing mobile home sales—had had an interest in being one of their product importers to the United States, but had eventually declined the opportunity, as it had seemed to him problematic that no two scarves, no two blouses or kimonos, would ever be the same. He had not been able to envision a way to catalog and market items which had not yet been created, and for which no pictures existed.
He still had the contact information, however, and when Ruth expressed an interest in learning more about the organization, he sent it to her, and she had written them.
The women were scheduled to travel the southern United States, with exhibitions of their work and methods, beginning in the textile communities of North Carolina, down into Alabama and then west to Texas and on to California, before returning home; and Ruth was able to secure a grant that allowed them to incorporate a program in Mormon Springs.
The weavers would be able to stay two weeks—there had been a gap in their schedule between their venues in Austin and Santa Barbara, and their plans had not been fully formed, other than to drift from town to town as they could, staying an indeterminate number of days with an informal collective of Quaker hosts around the country; and so they were delighted when they arrived at the bus station in Odessa and were greeted by Ruth and the students.
A support van was being driven from community to community, and it arrived not long after the bus. Richard and several of the parents spent the rest of the day helping them unload and set up out at an old abandoned stone granary near Ruth’s schoolhouse, where the women would live for those two weeks.
Their looms were designed so that they could be operated either by foot pedals or by cams and pulleys turned by hand, or, in the absence of hands or feet, by the flipper-like revolutions of their arms, churning like a swimmer’s, or by revolutions geared by the scissoring of their legs, working like those of a cyclist, with a slow road of raw silk scrolling beneath and before them.
The canvas walls of their weaving tent were constructed so that they could be lowered during stormy weather or raised during heat waves. Mosquito netting draped all four walls, but when the canvas sides were rolled up, the workers felt as if they were working in the desert itself.
In their tour of the South, as in Vietnam, they had need of the netting constantly, where the mosquitoes had swarmed, desiring the blood of those who had already given so much: but in the desert, there were no mosquitoes, and it was a joy to the women to work amidst such freedom.
There was a separate area in the tent where the women painted and dyed the strips of silk in unique patterns, and still others—a few of those accompanying the exhibit who still had the full use of their hands—sewed the painted silk into scarves and dresses and blouses.
There were false starts, errors, flaws and tears in the silk occasionally, or a poor mix of dye in which one section might be paler than the next; or something might go wrong in the drying process, causing a finished piece of silk to be unusable; and from these discards, with their barely noticeable flaws, the women fashioned their own clothes, and curtains for the doorways of the tent, and windows of their homes back in Vietnam, and sheets for their beds—wild, bright, bold, and brilliant colors of cobalt and lightning gold, cinnamon, melon—and still they had scarves and lengths of scarves left over.
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sp; With the most beautiful ones, they made prayer flags, which they sewed to the outer walls of the drab canvas tent, until it was covered with thousands of the wild-hued ribbons, like the plumage of birds, the scarves stirring in the breeze and making the occasional whispering sounds of silk against silk. The sight of the tent attached to the back of the little stone building, with the sere desert heat-dazzled beyond, and beneath the December-blue sky, thrilled the children each morning when they came to school, as it did all who saw it.
There was another, smaller tent, in which the women raised the silkworms that spun the silk. This was their gold, the secret engine of their existence, which helped power the fluttering soul of the scarves’ wild colors—the plain white moths and their progeny, the plain pale-gray silkworms—and the children of Mormon Springs, and of all the communities that the women visited, were put in charge of feeding them, and gathering the spun silk each day, and keeping the silkworms from overheating in the most stifling weather by providing them with a spray of water, just a mist, twice daily, like the faintest of rains.
Whether the winter migrations of neotropical birds were drawn first to the blazes of the fluttering ribbons attached to the women’s tent, or to the shadowy silhouettes of whirring moths in the separate, isolated tent, no one could be certain: but by the second day of the women’s arrival, the birds were swarming and flitting around the tent and the schoolhouse—blurs of neon red and blue and yellow and green like the fluttering scarves themselves. And for all of the days that the silk weavers of Vietnam were in Mormon Springs, the birds remained, roosting in the eaves of people’s homes and in the little wind-and-heat-stunted scraggly trees in their front yards, the birds stirring before dawn to swarm once more around the silkworm tent, to feed upon the trickles and streams of moths that escaped from the tent each time a flap was opened. The birds fed on the steady supply of aging moths, too, which were turned out from the tent whenever their silk production began to decline, replaced with the next wave of younger, stronger moths.
The birds roosted in the yard of Clarissa’s old house, taking refuge in the tangle of tumbleweed that pressed against the walls; and they flocked also to the towering lilacs that shrouded the house, so many of them in the evenings that it might have appeared that the tree had begun to blossom once more, and in all different hues, despite the lateness of the season.
Richard had stopped going out to the old house, though there were still nights when, in his loft, he dreamed that he was there, and so the birds slept undisturbed by anything other than the feral cats that rustled in the tangled maze beneath them; there were no lanterns, lamps, or candles to trouble their sleep, only the shell of darkness, with the birds’ great beauty unseen in the night.
The weaver women were made to feel at ease right from the start, in part by the immediate help and welcoming by the community—each night, a different family hosted them for dinner—and also by the visitations of Herbert Mix, and by the respected if not revered position he occupied in his community. But they were made most welcome of all by Marie, with whom they seemed to identify immediately; and she spent almost all of her time out in the tent with them, or helping the children take care of the moths.
And although Herbert Mix was happy for her, he felt also uncomfortably as if she was being taken away from him, as if lifted into flight by some greater force, while he, with his one leg like an anchor, remained below, flightless and abandoned. It was a feeling that was accentuated for him each time he approached the tent and saw from a distance the silhouettes of the workers, and their ceaseless, shifting industry within the tent: the sheets of silk rising and falling on the looms like the wings of great birds or dinosaurs trapped within, and the silhouettes of the weavers attending to the looms—some seated, others standing, but all startling in their asymmetry.
To Herbert Mix it seemed as if the strange figures were either trying to attack the winged creature, or to subdue and calm it; and yet then the desert wind would stir, the gauzed sheets of mosquito netting would billow, and it would seem that the laborers might be trying to encourage the dragon, or whatever the fallen creature was, back into flight: and as if somehow their own survival depended upon the success of that resurrection.
And in the smaller tent, also illuminated by the rising sun to create yet another stage of silhouettes, Herbert Mix could see the shadows of the thousands of swirling moths, their wings flashing and folding frantic semaphoric messages.
The sun pierced the moths, igniting every wing, turning each vein into a filament that magnified the sun’s light and filled them with an electrical charge. That light shuttered as the moths continued to swarm, and the entire canvas tent filled with flashing incandescence, so that it seemed to Herbert Mix that the tent was burning; and as he watched, the sun climbed and clicked south and west another notch, and the moth-fire subsided from the tent, the image cooling before his eyes.
Despite his missing leg, he felt self-conscious in the women’s presence; and although they knew a fair amount of English, he had trouble understanding them, due to their accents. Marie was better able to comprehend or intuit the women’s directions and moods: and though he would have liked to have learned how to operate the looms, seating himself at one or another of the stations, he sensed that there was an immediate lowering in the level of joy on the few times that he had entered the silk weavers’ tent.
He could not help but ascribe it to the notion that on some level they associated him, because he was a man, with warfare, and the weapons by which they had lost their limbs. He would have thought that because he shared that loss with them, there would be more intimacy, not less, between them, but it did not seem to be working that way, and so he retreated, left them to their private weavings and their inscrutable communications.
Marie told them about her life, about the elephant that had once passed through, and they understood, for they had each had elephants in their villages, and in their lives, at one point or another.
Other times they spoke no words, but gave themselves over to the looms, became lost in the clatter of the operation, feeding the silk into the guides, choosing not through any previous day’s foredesign the color and texture of the new creation, but deciding such things only in the moment, often only at the last instant, even as one rocker-arm was rising and another falling: and in this, they were free, freer than they had ever been; and later in the day, when they began to paint their own designs and no other’s onto the silk that was utterly of their making, great beauty arising and then blossoming out of the random barbarities of war, they felt each time—whether they had been weaving for only a month, or for years—that they had transcended even freedom, or the need for freedom: and in this state, they felt a strength they had never known.
Marie felt it, too. Though hers were not physical, she too had absences, caverns and abysses and long-hollow crevices, and she felt the rush of color, the blaze of the scarves, flooding into those vacancies.
Nor was it all about taking. She felt the color rushing out of her, too: flowing, as if from her fingers, her eyes, her mouth, color rushing back out onto the sand-colored landscape, and into the little town. She felt herself giving, as she had always given, but this time there was a pulse and a rhythm, a balance between the two, taking, giving, as synchronous and graceful as the gearings of the strangers’ clattering looms. She had never felt fuller or stronger; and from the first day, she began to dread the silk weavers’ leaving.
They stored the best of the apparel in tin chests decorated with scrollwork and rhinestones, and lined with strips of cedar to keep the clothes sweet smelling, and to protect them against insect damage. The slightly flawed garments they reserved for themselves and distributed also to the communities through which they passed.
They fastened the remnant scraps of silk to the rim of the basketball hoop at the school, and to the school’s cedar rafters, and to the few light posts in Mormon Springs, and to the fences and gates outside people’s homes, and to the lone stop sign.
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Still they had scraps left over, and as the weavers’ work progressed, they began sending them into Odessa: lining the streets there, too, and the buildings. Richard decorated the outer sills and ledges of his loft windows with long trellises of remnant silk, and when he took the schoolchildren out into the desert, they tied the colorful strips to the pumpjacks of oil wells and the casings of gas wellheads.
There had never been so much color in the desert, not in December or any other month, and at night, the children as well as the adults dreamed in color; and even those who had not led lives as rough as Marie or the weavers felt nonetheless fresher and stronger. That old wounds they had not even known they had or remembered were beginning to heal, and they too began to wish that the weavers would stay.
And each day, Herbert Mix stood on the outside of their tent and watched the silhouettes within, the flashing and leaping ascent and slide of the crofter and the laird. She is happy, he thought, she is so happy. And he felt his old hunger, his hollowness, returning.
Marie continued to work with the weavers in the tent, learning to operate the various looms. She was of great value with certain tasks, such as the threading of the silk into the looms before each shift—and she had also been spending time with the silk painters, and already had created some beautiful patterns and colors, and had sewn several suits and dresses.
She hung these blouses and skirts and scarves on the racks in the display section of the tent, next to those of the other workers, and was overjoyed by the communion she felt in doing so: not just the acceptance and approval, but the admiration.